Zach Snyder’s Rebel Moon
For those of you that are remotely curious. no, it has absolutely nothing to do with Vox’s game by that name.
Here is the plot.
“The plot of Rebel Moon is “a peaceful colony on the edge of the galaxy is threatened by the armies of a tyrannical regent named Balisarius. Desperate, the colonists dispatch a young woman with a mysterious past to seek out warriors from neighboring planets to help them make a stand.”
Oh, my Glob. This is the plot for Battle Beyond the Stars.
Back in 1979 shlockmeister extraordinaire Roger Corman noticed that this science fiction stuff was bringing in the kids, so he decided to slap together his own space opera. He cast John-Boy Walton as the lead because he looked like a budget Mark Hamill back then, as well as the finest B-movie stars that hadn’t quit the business yet. Like Robert Vaughn, John Saxon, Sybil Danning, and Who Gives A Shit, because the only other names you’ll recognize are the ones that found their way out of the dreck mines.
That is the only thing really interesting about this movie, the number of careers that came out of it. Which should have been zero.
George Peppard’s career made a big comeback shortly after this was released on the A-Team.
Julia Duffy landed a long-running, high-profile gig as Stephanie in Newhart.
But the biggest name to emerge was the poor shlub that Corman stiffed for the special effects, one, James Cameron. It’s been forty years and he’s still mad about it.
Anyway with this dazzling array of career stagnation assembled, and a movie poster run-up, it was time to come up with a story. Which Corman did using his preferred method, he threw a dart while, blindfolded at his movie poster collection to decide which plot he was going to swipe.
The dart landed on the Magnificent Seven which was itself a ripoff of Seven Samurai, so that was a two-fer.
And now Zack Snyder is ripping off that plot for Rebel Moon. Zach please, please stop writing your own scripts, it is indeed and truly not your thing.
Okay, I’m done here.
